“You’re so far away.” I gestured to the expanse of table between us. “It’s like you’re in another room.”
The quarters of the table vanished, leaving Tamlin not two feet away, sitting at an infinitely more intimate table. I yelped and almost tipped over in my chair. He laughed as I gaped at the small table that now stood between us. “Better?” he asked.
I ignored the metallic tang of magic as I said, “How … how did you do that? Where did it go?”
He cocked his head. “Between. Think of it as … a broom closet tucked between pockets of the world.” He flexed his hands and rolled his neck, as if shaking off some pain.
“Does it tax you?” Sweat seemed to gleam on the strong column of his neck.
He stopped flexing his hands and set them flat on the table. “Once, it was as easy as breathing. But now … it requires concentration.”
Because of the blight on Prythian and the toll it had taken on him. “You could have just taken a closer seat,” I said.
Tamlin gave me a lazy grin. “And miss a chance to show off to a beautiful woman? Never.” I smiled down at my plate.
“You do look beautiful,” he said quietly. “I mean it,” he added when my mouth twisted to the side. “Didn’t you look in the mirror?”
Though his bruise still marred my neck, I had looked pretty. Feminine. I wouldn’t go so far as to call myself a beauty, but … I hadn’t cringed. A few months here had done wonders for the awkward sharpness and angles of my face. And I dared say that some kind of light had crept into my eyes—my eyes, not my mother’s eyes or Nesta’s eyes. Mine.
“Thank you,” I said, and was grateful to avoid saying anything else as he served me and then himself. When my stomach was full to bursting, I dared to look at him—really look at him—again.
Tamlin leaned back in his chair, yet his shoulders were tight, his mouth a thin line. He hadn’t been called to the border in a few days—hadn’t come back weary and covered in blood since before Fire Night. And yet … He’d grieved for that nameless Summer Court faerie with the hacked-off wings. What grief and burdens did he bear for whoever else had been lost in this conflict—lost to the blight, or to the attacks on the borders? High Lord—a position he hadn’t wanted or expected, yet he’d been forced to bear its weight as best he could.
“Come,” I said, rising from my chair and tugging on his hand. The calluses scraped against mine, but his fingers tightened as he looked up at me. “I have something for you.”
“For me,” he repeated carefully, but rose. I led him out of the dining room. When I went to drop his hand, he didn’t let go. It was enough to keep me walking quickly, as if I could outrun my thundering heart or the sheer immortal presence of him at my side. I brought him down hall after hall until we got to my little painting room, and he finally released my hand as I reached for the key. Cold air bit into my skin without the warmth of his hand around mine.
“I knew you’d asked Alis for a key, but I didn’t think you actually locked the room,” he said behind me.
I gave him a narrowed glance over my shoulder as I pushed open the door. “Everyone snoops in this house. I didn’t want you or Lucien coming in here until I was ready.”
I stepped into the darkened room and cleared my throat, a silent request for him to light the candles. It took him longer than I’d seen him need before, and I wondered if shortening the table had somehow drained him more than he’d let on. The Suriel had said the High Lords were Power—and yet … yet something had to be truly, thoroughly wrong if this was all he could manage. The room gradually flared with light, and I pushed my worry aside as I stepped farther into the room. I took a deep breath and gestured to the easel and the painting I’d put there. I hoped he wouldn’t notice the paintings I’d leaned against the walls.
He turned in place, staring around him at the room.
“I know they’re strange,” I said, my hands sweating again. I tucked them behind my back. “And I know they’re not like—not as good as the ones you have here, but …” I walked to the painting on the easel. It was an impression, not a lifelike rendering. “I wanted you to see this one,” I said, pointing to the smear of green and gold and silver and blue. “It’s for you. A gift. For everything you’ve done.”
Heat flared in my cheeks, my neck, my ears, as he silently approached the painting.
“It’s the glen—with the pool of starlight,” I said quickly.
“I know what it is,” he murmured, studying the painting. I backed away a step, unable to bear watching him look at it, wishing I hadn’t brought him in here, blaming it on the wine I’d had at dinner, on the stupid dress. He examined the painting for a miserable eternity, then looked away—to the nearest painting leaning against the wall.
My gut tightened. A hazy landscape of snow and skeletal trees and nothing else. It looked like … like nothing, I supposed, to anyone but me. I opened my mouth to explain, wishing I’d turned the others away from view, but he spoke.
“That was your forest. Where you hunted.” He came closer to the painting, gazing at the bleak, empty cold, the white and gray and brown and black. “This was your life,” he clarified.
I was too mortified, too stunned, to reply. He walked to the next painting I’d left against the wall. Darkness and dense brown, flickers of ruby red and orange squeezing out between them. “Your cottage at night.”
I tried to move, to tell him to stop looking at those ones and look at the others I’d laid out, but I couldn’t—couldn’t even breathe properly as he moved to the next painting. A tanned, sturdy male hand fisted in the hay, the pale pieces of it entwined among strands of brown coated with gold—my hair. My gut twisted. “The man you used to see—in your village.” He cocked his head again as he studied the picture, and a low growl slipped out. “While you made love.” He stepped back, looking at the row of pictures. “This is the only one with any brightness.”
Was that … jealousy? “It was the only escape I had.” Truth. I wouldn’t apologize for Isaac. Not when Tamlin had just been in the Great Rite. I didn’t hold that against him—but if he was going to be jealous of Isaac—
Tamlin must have realized it, too, for he loosed a long, controlled breath before moving to the next painting. Tall shadows of men, bright red dripping off their fists, off their wooden clubs, hovering and filling the edges of the painting as they towered over the curled figure on the floor, the blood leaking from him, the leg at a wrong angle.
Tamlin swore. “You were there when they wrecked your father’s leg.”
“Someone had to beg them to stop.”
Tamlin threw a too-knowing glance in my direction and turned to look at the rest of the paintings. There they were, all the wounds I’d slowly been leeching these few months. I blinked. A few months. Did my family believe that I would be forever away with this so-called dying aunt?
At last, Tamlin looked at the painting of the glen and the starlight. He nodded in appreciation. But he pointed to the painting of the snow-veiled woods. “That one. I want that one.”
“It’s cold and melancholy,” I said, hiding my wince. “It doesn’t suit this place at all.”
He went up to it, and the smile he gave me was more beautiful than any enchanted meadow or pool of stars. “I want it nonetheless,” he said softly.
I’d never yearned for anything more than to remove his mask and see the face beneath, to find out whether it matched how I’d dreamed he looked.
“Tell me there’s some way to help you,” I breathed. “With the masks, with whatever threat has taken so much of your power. Tell me—just tell me what I can do to help you.”
“A human wishes to help a faerie?”
“Don’t tease me,” I said. “Please—just … tell me.”
“There’s nothing I want you to do, nothing you can do—or anyone. It’s my burden to bear.”
“You don’t have to—”
“I do. What I have to face, what I endure, Feyre … you would not survive.”
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“So I’m to live here forever, in ignorance of the true scope of what’s happening? If you don’t want me to understand what’s going on … would you rather …” I swallowed hard. “Rather I found someplace else to live? Where I’m not a distraction?”
“Didn’t Calanmai teach you anything?”
“Only that magic makes you into a brute.”
He laughed, though not entirely with amusement. When I remained silent, he sighed. “No, I don’t want you to live somewhere else. I want you here, where I can look after you—where I can come home and know you’re here, painting and safe.”
I couldn’t look away from him. “I thought about sending you away at first,” he murmured. “Part of me still thinks I should have found somewhere else for you to live. But maybe I was selfish. Even when you made it so clear that you were more interested in ignoring the Treaty or finding a way out of it, I couldn’t bring myself to let you go—to find someplace in Prythian where you’d be comfortable enough to not attempt to flee.”
“Why?”
He picked up the small painting of the frozen forest and examined it again. “I’ve had many lovers,” he admitted. “Females of noble birth, warriors, princesses …” Rage hit me, low and deep in the gut at the thought of them—rage at their titles, their undoubtedly good looks, at their closeness to him. “But they never understood. What it was like, what it is like, for me to care for my people, my lands. What scars are still there, what the bad days feel like.” That wrathful jealousy faded away like morning dew as he smiled at my painting. “This reminds me of it.”
“Of what?” I breathed.
He lowered the painting, looking right at me, right into me. “That I’m not alone.”
I didn’t lock my bedroom door that night.
Chapter 23
The next afternoon I lay on my back in the grass, savoring the warmth of the sunshine filtering through the canopy of leaves, noting how I might incorporate it into my next painting. Lucien, claiming that he had miserable emissary business to attend to, had left Tamlin and me to our own devices, and the High Lord had taken me to yet another beautiful spot in his enchanted forest.
But there were no enchantments here—no pools of starlight, no rainbow waterfalls. It was just a grassy glen watched over by a weeping willow, with a clear brook running through it. We lounged in comfortable silence, and I glanced at Tamlin, who dozed beside me. His golden hair and mask glistened bright against the emerald carpet. The delicate arch of his pointed ears made me pause.
He opened an eye and smiled lazily at me. “That willow’s singing always puts me to sleep.”
“The what of what?” I said, propping myself on my elbows to stare at the tree above us.
Tamlin pointed toward the willow. The branches sighed as they moved in the breeze. “It sings.”
“I suppose it sings war-camp limericks, too?”
He smiled and half sat up, twisting to look at me. “You’re human,” he said, and I rolled my eyes. “Your senses are still sealed off from everything.”
I made a face. “Just another of my many shortcomings.” But the word—shortcomings—had somehow stopped finding its mark.
He plucked a strand of grass from my hair. Heat radiated from my face as his fingers grazed my cheek. “I could make you able to see it,” he said. His fingers lingered at the end of my braid, twirling the curl of hair around. “See my world—hear it, smell it.” My breathing became shallow as he sat up. “Taste it.” His eyes flicked to the fading bruise on my neck.
“How?” I asked, heat blooming as he crouched before me.
“Every gift comes with a price.” I frowned, and he grinned. “A kiss.”
“Absolutely not!” But my blood raced, and I had to clench my hands in the grass to keep from touching him. “Don’t you think it puts me at a disadvantage to not be able to see all this?”
“I’m one of the High Fae—we don’t give anything without gaining something from it.”
To my own surprise, I said, “Fine.”
He blinked, probably expecting me to have fought a little harder. I hid my smile and sat up so that I faced him, our knees touching as we knelt in the grass. I licked my lips, my heart fluttering so quickly it felt as if I had a hummingbird inside my chest.
“Close your eyes,” he said, and I obeyed, my fingers grappling onto the grass. The birds chattered, and the willow branches sighed. The grass crunched as Tamlin rose up on his knees. I braced myself at the brush of his mouth on one of my eyelids, then on the other. He pulled away, and I was left breathless, the kisses still lingering on my skin.
The singing of birds became an orchestra—a symphony of gossip and mirth. I’d never heard so many layers of music, never heard the variations and themes that wove between their arpeggios. And beyond the birdsong, there was an ethereal melody—a woman, melancholy and weary … the willow. Gasping, I opened my eyes.
The world had become richer, clearer. The brook was a near-invisible rainbow of water that flowed over stones as invitingly smooth as silk. The trees were clothed in a faint shimmer that radiated from their centers and danced along the edges of their leaves. There was no tangy metallic stench—no, the smell of magic had become like jasmine, like lilac, like roses. I would never be able to paint it, the richness, the feel … Maybe fractions of it, but not the whole thing.
Magic—everything was magic, and it broke my heart.
I looked to Tamlin, and my heart cracked entirely.
It was Tamlin, but not. Rather, it was the Tamlin I’d dreamed of. His skin gleamed with a golden sheen, and around his head glowed a circlet of sunshine. And his eyes—
Not merely green and gold, but every hue and variation that could be imagined, as though every leaf in the forest had bled into one shade. This was a High Lord of Prythian—devastatingly handsome, captivating, powerful beyond belief.
My breath caught in my throat as I touched the contours of his mask. The cool metal bit into my fingertips, and the emeralds slipped against my callused skin. I lifted my other hand and gently grasped either side of the mask. I pulled lightly.
It wouldn’t move.
He began smiling as I pulled again, and I blinked, dropping my hands. Instantly, the golden, glowing Tamlin vanished, and the one I knew returned. I could still hear the singing of the willow and the birds, but …
“Why can’t I see you anymore?”
“Because I willed my glamour back into place.”
“Glamour for what?”
“To look normal. Or as normal as I can look with this damned thing,” he added, gesturing to the mask. “Being a High Lord, even one with … limited powers, comes with physical markers, too. It’s why I couldn’t hide what I was becoming from my brothers—from anyone. It’s still easier to blend in.”
“But the mask truly can’t come off—I mean, are you sure there’s no one who knows how to fix what the magic did that night? Even someone in another court?” I don’t know why the mask bothered me so greatly. I didn’t need to see his entire face to know him.
“I’m sorry to disappoint you.”
“I just … just want to know what you look like.” I wondered when I’d grown so shallow.
“What do you think I look like?”
I tilted my head to the side. “A strong, straight nose,” I said, drawing from what I’d once tried to paint. “High cheekbones that bring out your eyes. Slightly … slightly arched brows,” I finished, blushing. He was grinning so broadly that I could almost see all of his teeth—those fangs nowhere in sight. I tried to think up an excuse for my forwardness, but a yawn crept from me as a sudden weight pressed on my eyes.
“What about your part of the bargain?”
“What?”
He leaned closer, his smile turning wicked. “What about my kiss?”
I grabbed his fingers. “Here,” I said, and slammed my mouth against the back of his hand. “There’s your kiss.”
Tamlin roared with laughter, but the world blurred, l
ulling me to sleep. The willow beckoned me to lie down, and I obliged. From far off, I heard Tamlin curse. “Feyre?”
Sleep. I wanted sleep. And there was no better place to sleep than right here, listening to the willow and the birds and the brook. I curled on my side, using my arm for a pillow.
“I should bring you home,” he murmured, but he didn’t move to drag me to my feet. Instead, I felt a slight thud in the earth, and the spring rain and new grass scent of him cloyed in my nose as he lay beside me. I tingled with pleasure as he stroked my hair.
This was such a lovely dream. I’d never slept so wonderfully before. So warm, nestled beside him. Calm. Faintly, echoing into my world of slumber, he spoke again, his breath caressing my ear. “You’re exactly as I dreamed you’d be, too.” Darkness swallowed everything.
Chapter 24
It wasn’t the dawn that awoke me, but rather a buzzing noise. I groaned as I sat up in bed and squinted at the squat woman with skin made from tree bark who fussed with my breakfast dishes.
“Where’s Alis?” I asked, rubbing the sleep from my eyes. Tamlin must have carried me up here—must have carried me the whole way home.
“What?” She turned toward me. Her bird mask was familiar. But I would have remembered a faerie with skin like that. Would have painted it already.
“Is Alis unwell?” I said, sliding from the bed. This was my room, wasn’t it? A quick glance told me yes.
“Are you out of your right mind?” the faerie said. I bit my lip. “I am Alis,” she clucked, and with a shake of her head, she strode into the bathing room to start my bath.
It was impossible. The Alis I knew was fair and plump and looked like a High Fae.
I rubbed my eyes with my thumb and forefinger. A glamour—that’s what Tamlin had said he wore. His faerie sight had stripped away the glamours I’d been seeing. But why bother to glamour everything?